Wilmot G. James

After the TRC : reflections on truth and reconciliation in South Africa

An important symposium on the process and legacy of the TRC that looks at historical and comparative, local and international perspectives, as well as unfinished business and building the assets of the nation. Has South Africa dealt effectively with the past, and is the country ready to face the future? What are the challenges facing both government and civil society in the years ahead? These and other questions are explored in this collection of essays by international and local commentators on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. A range of perspectives on whether the TRC met its objectives of truth and reconciliation is presented. The areas of particular contention - the payment of reparation, the granting of amnesty, and memorialisation - are also examined. Finally, the major challenges facing South Africa are identified, and ways of meeting these challenges and developing the assets of the nation are explored.

Our precious metal : African labour in South Africa's gold industry, 1970-1990

Part I - organizing a labour supply: migrant labour and inter-state relations a buyers market - labour recruiting in the homelands urban labour and mine housing. Part II - the ascendancy of African workers: when African workers become unionized compounds as contested institutions the struggle over the colour bar.

Depopulating the compounds: Migrant labor and mine housing in South Africa

Production and profit in the South African gold mining industry have long been based upon the employment of cheap black migrant labor. The central institution in the migratory labor system is the compound or hostel. Over 97% of the mine workforce of 500,000 currently live in these single-sex, regimented barracks. Changes in the political economy of gold mining in the 1970s and 1980s have prompted management to begin moving away from migratory labor and implementing alternative accommodation strategies. This paper critically examines the nature of those strategies and the obstacles to their implementation. Although sections of the mining industry are now committed to stabilizing workers in family housing, management wishes to retain tight control of the process. This, together with worker resistance and state inaction, will ensure that progress away from migrancy will be achieved only at glacial pace.

Materialist history, materialist theory: A response to Charles Van Onselen

The publication of Charles van Onselens two volume Studies in the Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand 1886–1914 in 1982 is a landmark event in the development of historical materialist scholarship and South African historiography, (Van Onselen: 1982a; 1982b). No other publication has simultaneously been so unique and innovative, so sociologically sensitive and empirically embracing, combining in elegant intellectual fashion the best of social history, historical materialism and sociological theory. Other contributions notwithstanding, van Onselen can be credited with the production of the first sustained, thorough attempt at providing a genuine alternative historical materialist scholarship. ‘In a social context radically lacking in a socialist culture, devoid of a popular movement of institutionalised leftism, van Onselens Studies... have the status of remarkable intellectual product despite the absence of cultural ferment which one could have used to explain the germination and maturation...

Class and income inequality, South Africa 1980

Premised on the view that an explanation for the quantitative distribution of inequality must be rooted in an understanding of the qualitative ordering of social inequality, this paper argues that the most central structural dimension of social inequality in capitalist society, that of class, generates significantly different patterns of income distribution for different classes. The validity of this claim is demonstrated in the context of South Africa. It is shown that race, gender, education and occupational status have significantly different effects on income distribution when one class is compared with another.

Charles Darwin at the Cape: notes on his sociological observations

Charles Darwin spent most of his time geologising at the Cape - as he did everywhere else on the voyage of the Beagle. Andrew Smith, the Scottish surgeon, naturalist and zoologist and the first Superintendent of the South African Museum in Cape Town, accompanied him to the important Cape Peninsula sites, and he collected a variety of rock specimens. He kept a special geological notebook in which he described in considerable detail his geological and geographical observations of the road from Simonstown to Cape Town, Table Mountain, Lions Head and Rump, the Sea Point Contact, the road to Paarl, Paarl Rock, the Drakenstein Mountains, Franschoek and the pass to Houw Hoek, Sir Lowrys Pass and the Cape Flats.

Nolutshungu's South Africa

Sam Nolutshungus Changing South Africa is a formidable defense of the argument that the South African political economy is irreformable and that it promotes a revolutionary socialism among its opponents. The argument invites quarrel however: the account of the state is ahistorical, the depiction of the class structure open to question and the conclusion is idealistic.

Beyond musical chairs in the power bloc

The Emergence of Modern South Africa State, Capital and the Incorporation of Organised Labor on the South African Gold Fields, 1902–1939, by David Yudel‐man, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983, 315 pp.